Wednesday, March 16, 2011

I want my iPadTV!

When my daughter was eight, she started asking if she could have a computer in her room. When she turned nine, I decided that an iPad would be a nice compromise and she loves it. She's about to turn 10 years old and lately has been asking if she can have a TV in her room. That's not going to happen.

Yesterday, Time Warner Cable released a free application for the iPad that lets TWC customers watch 30 channels of TV on the iPad. It's a very nice app that works very well. I was happy to see that at least for the moment, the Disney Channel is not among the available iPad channels. However, Food Network is and my daughter loves that. So it looks like she's going to get a TV in her room (and in fact, anywhere in the house she takes her iPad) after all. You might think that watching TV on a iPad-sized screen wouldn't be all that great. But considering that you quite literally watch TV at an arm's length on the iPad, the viewing size actually works very well. Rather than spend money on another TV, you can now just use your iPad.

This was a very smart move on the part of Time Warner Cable. People are spending more and more time in front of their iPads (and computers) and less and less time watching TV. So what they have done is put themselves in front of those iPad users with an app. It will likely increase viewing and give their customers another reason to keep their cable and internet service with TWC.

It's great for Apple as well because at least some people will decide to spend their money on an iPad instead of buying yet another TV. Why buy a TV when you can have an iPad that does so much more for about the same price?

This is yet another sign of how important the iPad (and tablets in general) will be to the future of computing. We are committed to supporting these and are working on the prerequisite steps needed to do so. The most important of those is completing our support for LLVM. We already have support for LLVM in RBScript. Next, we need to support it for stand-alone applications. Once this is done, we will have the ARM processor support we need to begin building an iOS framework and possibly support other mobile devices.

Mobile devices are going to be critical to the future of computing and to the future of Real Studio.

Interesting App, well i use android here and dont have any Apple stuff YET. Its a bit expensive here in The Netherlands, so im thinking it over.For RBScript, i hope it will be smaller soon in the app as it uses alot of space today (on build).

@ SWORT - It would be great to make RBScript smaller but unfortunately, it's not possible. RBScript uses LLVM as its backend compiler (as we are planning to do for desktop apps). RBScript is big now because LLVM is big. There's little if anything we can do about that. Now for desktop apps it's not an issue because desktop apps don't have to include LLVM. But RBScript is a compiler and it relies on LLVM so it has to include it. The good news is that RBScript executes code up to 15 times faster with LLVM so while it makes your app bigger, it also makes it faster.

I was a user (commercial edition) of realbasic and RunRev at the same times. Now I use a lot LiveCode.The new web edition looks great but is seems impossible to test it ?LiveCode has good support of iOS, Android. You should go faster (I know, it is easy to say) because your tool is great but iPad and iPhone are the new Eldorado for small indies. So, When will give us iOS support ?